What is the purpose of institutionalized education?

page 288, second paragraph

I have not published anything in this blog for almost half of a year.  In large part, this hiatus was due to beginning writing, defending, and publishing this monstrosity.  I will start teaching full-time at a Canadian International School in Jiangsu province, China, in January and so I felt that this was as good a time as ever to finish this blog post and to re-energize this blog.

I've danced around the question of the purpose of institutionalized education for over half of a decade.  As someone who changed his entire life trajectory to that of affecting reform of institutionalized education, it's rather ironic that I have never attempted to address the "final cause" of education in writing or otherwise.  I've yet to attempt to explain the conceptual logic behind what I continue to choose to do on a daily basis.

I am almost certain that there is an end that links all means of institutionalized education.  Educa-tion can connote the process of "putting someone through" something. When referenced to a curriculum, education can be both figuratively and practically defined as "putting someone through a course."

Therefore, all means of education can be described as means of putting or guiding someone through some kind of process.  This author wonders "why do we bother putting someone through anything?"

From my experience, the final purpose of any and all education is to foster responsibility: i.e., a particular onus or commitment to respecting and to enacting a disposition of responsiveness.

There's a wealth of nomenclature utilized throughout the scholarship of pedagogies that describe aspects of this unifying purpose of education, from mindfulness, to forms of critical thinking, to resiliency.  However, these terms are all aspects of or precursors to an end of fostering greater responsibility.

After all, one's greater responsibility is directly linked to one's greater degree of knowledge.  One cannot be responsible for that which one does not know.  Moreover, the desire to foster knowledge mirrors the desire to foster a kind of responsibility where there was none before.  More generally, there are as many forms of responsibility as there are forms of knowing.

Furthermore, we can only be responsible for that which we have some degree of certainty.  Regardless of context, without a basic degree of certainty of cause and effect, one cannot be responsible for an outcome.  Therefore, to foster certainty is to foster the precursor to responsibility.

Throughout the past, certain forms of knowing have come to be discredited or disavowed of the same legitimacy as that of other forms of knowing.  Today, scientific understanding, or certainty derived from observing patterns and habits, holds sway in many parts of the world.  In spite of the rise of scientific methodology, knowledge from authority continues to hold prominence.

Just as certain forms of knowing have been gradually discredited over time, so have certain forms of responsibility.  Our degree of responsibility is directly constrained by our knowledge that we hold with the greatest certainty.

But regardless of one's epistemology, or means of knowing, one educates for responsibility.  Whether it be a responsibility to use proper grammar, to uphold the sacraments, to the proper use of electron microscopes, or to utilizing the fine motor skills required to create a work of visual beauty, educators seem to educate to this common end.

Moreover, educators working within the disciplines concerned with humanity teach toward a particular set of aspects of responsiveness, empathy.  What is empathy, but a kind of humanistic responsibility? What are the capacities of empathy, but cognitive processes involved in accurately responding to human needs?

Importantly, responsibility is nothing more than a set of suggestions for action; responsibilities as human dispositions do not control action.  Cognitive empathy, (empathic capacity dependent on thought processes), provides a person with a set of suggestions for how to best act with or toward another person.  But a person can refuse to listen to the data he/she acquires through his/her empathic capacity, just as any person with any responsibility can shirk it.  However, the fact remains, without any degree of responsibility, without any degree of certainty, one cannot behave ethically even by one's own standard(s) --- nihilism being the noted exception.

The commonality among the various products of education has some important implications for how to effectively conduct the processes of education.  I've already spoken of the importance of fostering appreciation.  Appreciation, like technique, is merely a means to responsibility or to acting responsibly.

The goal of this post is to serve as a far-cry to educators contemplating the learning objectives, specific and overall expectations, prescribed learning outcomes, and <insert ministry edujargon here>, of their educational programming.  If the goal of education is to foster responsiveness, then this goal should be reflected in how we structure our interactions with students.

I try to be reasonably skeptical of my own ideas.  However, this commonality across ends of educative processes has held in every instance I've witnessed to date.  You are welcome, as always, to challenge my opinion.  These posts are intended to serve as contributions to the continuing discourse, not as solutions.
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When I participated in service-learning in Berlin and Poland as a part of my Teacher Education program, I visited Birkenhau.  Today, behind what was "the little white house", there's an open field.  One of vilest acts against humanity in recorded history occurred in and around that field.  It's one thing to torture and murder human beings on a vast scale.  It's altogether another to have their kin dig up the victims' remains and burn them in order to hide the evidence of your deeds.  The conductors of this abominable tragedy demonstrated by facilitating it that they knowingly shirked their responsibilities to their victims' and their own humanity.  I now have the responsibility to carry-out their memory and, given the seeming logic of education, now you do too.

Contradictory virtues: The problem of honesty and humility

It has been months since I've written any words in this blog.  This post alone has been several months in the making.  Ironically, I'm finishing this post at a point when I have the least time available to write extra-curricularly.  I, and my thesis committee, have committed to beginning to completing the writing of my thesis in just over 6 weeks, definitely my greatest challenge yet.

The subject of this post has been grinding my gears for some time now and I felt I should take some time to finally enunciate it in writing.

As many readers of this blog may know, I've committed myself absolutely to attempting to live a good life.  I've explored the implications of this before and will not reiterate them here.  My concern with this post is the problem of living virtuously in the Aristotelian sense of virtue.

Specifically, I'm concerned with the virtues of honesty and humility.  For a significant chunk of my life, I've committed myself to these principles.  As of late, however, I've realized that these two virtues in particular stand in contradiction to each other when one attempts to exercise them practically.

Simply put, to act absolutely honestly is to almost inevitably come across arrogant and excessively prideful and to be absolutely humble often necessitates disingenuous and ultimately dishonest behaviour.

As I stated in my first Facebook note which became my first blog post ever, I've often had to deny my own qualities in order to not violate the sensitivities of others.  It's only now upon much reflection that I've realized how dishonest this adherence has made my behaviour.  The more I give and do, the less honest I've found myself about the degree to which I engage in both.  To maintain humility and avoid risking violating the sensitivities of those who give and do less by their own standards, I've become more and more disengenous.  And I hate it because it's so dishonest but yet I find it necessary to maintain a sufficient degree of humility.  I'm sure even writing a blog post such as this can appear, to some, as a form of arrogance or at least of excessive presumptuousness.

What I've found is that the flip side is even worse.  Rather than be honest about myself and risk coming off arrogant, the alternative is to try to be absolutely humble.  But attempting to exercise absolute humility often amounts to my avoiding saying or even implying anything about who I am or about what I do.  In fact, to some, I potentially violate the virtue of humility by simply suggesting that I'm having this problem in the first place~

It's a lose; lose situation.

Here's a practical example.  I've found trying to enact both the virtues of honesty and humility especially problematic when consoling those with severe depression.  For the longest time I thought that approaching those with such depression in a purposefully positive manner would support those individuals in feeling better.  But it doesn't work like that in real life.  More often, that approach has made those individuals feel more depressed and insecure about their current situation.  They wonder why they can't be as positive or feel as good as I'm portraying and it sends them spiraling further.  So I've had to take to what I would honestly consider lying to support them in feeling better.  Absolutely bjorked, but depression is bjorked.  I really feel for those who struggle with it on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, there's not much any of us can do other than give these people support and time when they feel and communicate that they're ready for it.

From what I can tell, there is no "solution" to the practical contradiction of enacting both honesty and humility.  But they're still awesome virtues individually.  However, I think we need to be mindful of their pursuit's practical consequences for other people and how these consequences potentially threaten these virtues' nature as virtues.

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So essentially your options are arrogant prick or lying sack of ****.  You're going to end up being one if you try to absolutely avoid the essence of the other.  Maybe this is why Aristotle called for moderation in all things.

I'll close with some of the ever inspiring words of Paulo Freire on the importance of humility to dialogue.

"On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. Dialogue, as the encounter of those addressed to the common task of learning and acting, is broken if the parties (or one of them) lack humility. How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others---mere "its" in whom I cannot recognize other "I"s? How can I dialogue if I consider myself a member of the in-group of "pure" men, the owners of truth and knowledge, for whom all non-members are "these people" or "the great unwashed"? How can I dialogue if I start from the premise that naming the world is the task of an elite and that the presence of the people in history is a sign of deterioration, thus to be avoided? How can I dialogue if I am closed to---and even offended by---the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced, the mere possibility causing me torment and weakness? Self-sufficiency is incompatible with dialogue. Men and women who lack humility (or have lost it) cannot come to the people, cannot be their partners in naming the world. Someone who cannot acknowledge himself to be as mortal as everyone else still has a long way to go before he can reach the point of encounter. At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages: there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know." 

- Pedagogy of the Oppressed